Isn't It Romantic?
"Isn't It Romantic?" is a popular song and part of the Great American Songbook. The music was composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Lorenz Hart. It has a 32-bar chorus in ABAC form. Alec Wilder, in his book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950, calls it "a perfect song."
It was introduced by Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in the Paramount film Love Me Tonight (1932). It has since been recorded numerous times, with and without vocals, by many jazz and popular artists. It has also since been featured in a number of movies, including several other Paramount films, such as William Seiter's Hot Saturday (1932), Mark Sandrich's Skylark (1941), Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve (1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942), and several Billy Wilder films, including A Foreign Affair (1948) and Sabrina (1954). It's also featured in the 1999 remake of The Out-of-Towners.
In Love Me Tonight, the song is used in a sequence in which it is first sung by Maurice Chevalier, a tailor, and then taken up by others (his customer, a cabby, a composer, a troop of soldiers, a band of gypsies) and is finally heard and sung by a princess, played by Jeanette MacDonald. The lyrics in the film are not the same as those in the published version. In 2004 this version finished at #73 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs survey of top tunes in American cinema.
Isn't It Romantic? (film)
Isn't It Romantic? is a 1948 film from Paramount Pictures, directed by Norman Z. McLeod and starring Veronica Lake and Billy De Wolfe. Supporting actors included Mona Freeman, Richard Webb and Pearl Bailey. Although it takes its title from a 1932 song by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, it is based on a novel called Gather Ye Rosebuds by Jeannette C. Nolan.
The plot of Isn't It Romantic? is set in Indiana after the Civil War and is about three daughters courted by three young men.
Plot
Major Euclid Cameron (Roland Culver), an officer of the Southern Army during the Civil War, writes his memoirs about the hardships of battle right after the war. It is set in Indiana, at the time of Reconstruction, and the Major's finances are not in order. Cameron's daughters, Candy (Veronica Lake), Susie (Mona Freeman) and Rose (Mary Hatcher), urge him to get a job so they can pay the family's debts. The strongheaded Major refuses, taking pride in the fact that no Cameron has ever had a decent job. He talks himself out of a job offer from a banker in town, Clarissa Thayer (Kathryn Givney), a single woman who has always found him attractive.
